1492: Christopher Columbus sails from La Gomera in the Canary Islands, his final port of call before crossing the Atlantic for the first time.
1522: The Victoria, one of the surviving ships of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition, returns to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain, becoming the first ship to circumnavigate the world.
1620: The Pilgrims sail from Plymouth, England, on the Mayflower to settle in North America.
1628: Puritans settle Salem, which will later become part of Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1861: Forces under Union General Ulysses S. Grant bloodlessly capture Paducah, Kentucky, which gives the Union control of the mouth of the Tennessee River.
1888: Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr, Kennedy family patriarch, is born.
1893: Claire Chennault is born. He commanded the Flying Tigers during WWII.
1901: Anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots and fatally wounds US President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
1925: Jimmy Reed, electric blues pioneer, is born.1928: Robert M. Pirsig is born. He wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
1937: Sergio Aragones is born. He does those great little cartoons in the margins of Mad Magazine.
1937: Jo Anne Worley is born.1939: David Allen Coe is born. He wrote the proletarian anthem "Take This Job And Shove It."
1943: Roger Waters of Pink Floyd is born.
1944: Swoosie Kurtz is born.
1947: Jane Curtain is born.
1949: Allied military authorities relinquish control of former Nazi Germany assets back to German control.
1949: A former sharpshooter in World War II, Howard Unruh kills 13 neighbors in Camden, New Jersey, with a souvenir Luger to become the first U.S. single-episode mass murderer.
1958: Jeff Foxworthy is born.
1958: Michael Winslow is born. He's the sound effects guy from the Police Academy movies!
1964: Rosie Perez is born.
1966: In Cape Town, South Africa, the architect of Apartheid, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, is stabbed to death during a parliamentary meeting.1976: Soviet air force pilot Lt. Viktor Belenko lands a MiG-25 jet fighter at Hakodate on the island of Hokkaido- in Japan and requests political asylum in the United States.
1991: The name Saint Petersburg is restored to Russia's second largest city, which had been renamed Leningrad in 1924.
1995: Cal Ripken Jr of the Baltimore Orioles plays in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking a record that stood for 56 years.
Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.
